The present invention relates to a modular process for dismantling light automobile vehicles for recovering and recycling their detached parts with a view to economic valorization thereof.
More than 1,200,000 light vehicles are to be destroyed each year in France. Those involved in such destruction may be summarily classified as follows:
car breakers, those who are generally insufficiently equiped to cope with the whole problem;
scrap merchants, those who demolish automobiles only when justified by the market rate of the metals and scrap iron;
garage mechanics who dismantle some cars for their second-hand market; nevertheless, taking into account the prescriptions of the manufacturers on the one hand, of the price of land or environmental preoccupations on the other hand, garage keepers are more and more hesitant to accumulate wrecks;
individuals who illegally break up cars which are neither evaluated nor evaluatable and escape all the normal trade and control circuits, creating unfair competition for professional car breakers, unsafe environment and, more generally, a precariousness of the profession, considerably discrediting it with regard to the public.
Furthermore, all the drawbacks of the present system of automobile demolition as practiced by the professionals are also known.
Mention will firstly be made of the enormous losses or depreciations of material simply by the vehicles remaining outside, the present average being 6 months per vehicle (blockage of the engines, of the braking circuits, rotting of the seats, corrosion, freezing up, breaking of windscreens, etc. . . ).
To these losses are added the difficulties of dismantling and handling effected outside in an inappropriate environment; in addition, it is difficult to assess the losses due to theft or vandalism of all types.
Other drawbacks follow from the present system which consists rathermore in stacking than in managing; no stock of vehicles or of detached parts is at present really accounted for, whilst the number of references which should be automatically processed is estimated at more than 50,000. The precarious conditions of demolition work in poorly equiped workshops or on totally uncomfortable work-sites considerably aggravate the difficulties of a profession which, in addition, knows nothing of the elementary bases of selling: no structure of reception, no tariffs, no catalogue and even sometimes no service, particularly for dismantling a part from a vehicle. Finally, the incontestable impact of this profession on the environment, whether it be question of problems of aesthetics or of ecology due to the pollution of the ground by rejection of oils, leads to enormous losses of substances due to the lack of organization of a profession which today is completely overcome by its product and its market, and poorly considered by its clientele which should therefore be reconquered.
In order to overcome all the drawbacks of the present system, the need has therefore appeared for a highly industrialized process for demolishing vehicles, on the one hand, in order to absorb the annual quantity of vehicles to be "broken" and, on the other hand, to recover the detached parts thereof and more generally all products likely to be recycled economically. A process for dismantling vehicles has thus been proposed, employing a basic module which may for example treat a constant quantity of vehicles per day, it being observed that, contrary to the assembly of a new vehicle, it is illusory to predetermine operational times for dismantling a used vehicle.
In fact, depending on the state of a vehicle, for example if it was involved in an accident or not, the operations of dismantling and recovery of the parts might vary considerably, not only in time, but also in number; this is the principal structural difficulty which has always limited the professionals totally unsuited to cope with the problem.